Ideology and Organization in Communist China

By Franz Schurmann

In 1949 a powerful political-military movement, led by the Chinese Communist party, gained control of war-ravaged China, inheriting a disorganized administration and a society eroded by decades of revolution. Within a short time China was so radically transformed politically, economically, and socially that it appeared to have cut all links with the past. The instruments of that transformation were ideology and organization. Today, seventeen years later, the ideology and the organizational network, despite changes, remain as powerful as they were in 1949. They still hold that vast country together politically and determine its economic and social development. This book, after a discussion of ideology in its first part, attempts to answer the question how Chinese Communist organization functions and why it is so successful. The second part analyzes the organization of Party and government, emphasizing methods of command and administration. The third part looks at industrial organization: the problems of management and control, especially the continuing struggle between the professionals and the politicians. The fourth part investigates the Chinese Communist methods of organizing their cities and villages, tracing the history of village organization from traditional times through the Yenan period, the land reform of the late 1940's, and the collectivization of the mid-1950's to communization in 1958. Although organization has been constantly changing in China, basic patterns ar apparent. The book analyzes the most characteristic pattern in all aspects of organization, the conflict between two incompatible elements or, in the Chinese Communist terms, "contradictions." The basic contradiction is that between professional ("expert") and political ("red") elements. This contradiction dominates the two distinctive periods in the short history of Communist China, the First Five-Year Plan (1953 - 1957) and the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958 - 1960). The book describes how the Chinese Communists attempted during the former period to emulate the Soviet organizational experience, with stress on techniques and technology; and during the latter period to use their own organizational methods to achieve economic progress. The presentation of the contrast between these two models of organization sheds light on the significant differences between the Soviet Union and Communist China. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520311152

Franz Schurmann

H. F. Schurmann was Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Book preview

THE CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

at the University of California, Berkeley, supported by the Ford Foundation, the Institute of International Studies (University of California, Berkeley), and the State of California, is the unifying organization for social science and interdisciplinary research on contemporary China.

IDEOLOGY

AND

ORGANIZATION

IN

COMMUNIST

CHINA

SECOND EDITION, ENLARGED FRANZ SCHURMANN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES 1968

SECOND EDITION, ENLARGED

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Cambridge University Press London, England

© 1966, 1968 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 68-26124 Printed in the United States of America

TO

SSB

AND

L

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The continuing interest in this book, prompted the University of California Press to urge me to prepare a second edition sooner than I had intended. That extraordinary event known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which came as a surprise to almost everyone in the field, called into question many analyses of China done by the growing corps of scholars of contemporary China. Had our concepts and categories of analysis been wrong? Had we somehow failed to see the essence of China because of our Western outlook? A reexamination of all that we had done seemed called for.

Since several reviewers of my book pointed out that it dealt largely with the 1950’s, I decided to add a supplement on China’s ideology, organization, and society during the 1960's. I have not done any special research, other than what I do normally as a student concerned with China—read the newspapers, the Red Guard tabloids, and articles on China written by journalists and scholars. In December 1967, it seemed to me that the Cultural Revolution was subsiding, and that therefore I could attempt an evaluation, and with that, try to link the currents of the Cultural Revolution with those of the period from 1961 to 1966. The supplement does not treat the Cultural Revolution separately, but generally discusses it in the context of the history of the entire period from 1961 to 1967.

I must say that, by and large, the writing of the supplement has not induced me to discard the analytical tools I used in writing the book. I have changed some earlier views, for example in regard to differences between professional and "expert/’ which I earlier regarded as identical. Most important of all has been my awareness that ideology and organization are not so all-powerful as 1 had thought them to be. Chinese society, particularly in the form of its social classes, is asserting itself against the state, and showing that it cannot be manipulated at will. I do not see this so much as the reappearance of traditional forces as the assertion of human beings, individually and collectively, against the impersonal power of an immense organizational structure. Chairman Mao took a great risk in unleashing the masses against those in power. He did so for his own political reasons, but in the process loosened up a society which had for years been tightly controlled.

When I completed the first edition, the Vietnam war had just begun. It did not yet seem that world peace was threatened. Today, the threat of a greater war looms, and the possibilities of Chinese involvement can not be excluded. I do not believe that the Cultural Revolution itself was caused by the growing war clouds, but its violence and urgency were. The Chinese have always believed that one day they would again be emmeshed in a major war, but they were surprised at the rapidity of the escalation of the Vietnam war. I have written about the importance of whether the environment be defined as one of change or stability (pp. 235-236). Most scholars in the field, I believe, came increasingly to assume that, because world peace was assured, the environment surrounding China could only be one of stability, and that, therefore, it was Mao Tse-tung’s willful determination to keep the revolution alive which turned an environment of stability into one of change. But the chief cause for turning the environment into one of change and now of crisis is the Vietnam war.

I wish to thank, in particular, Joseph Anderson Shih, Gene Hsiao, Michel Oksenberg, and Donald Klein for their help in ferreting out errors in the first edition; the second edition has been accordingly revised.

F. S.

February, 1968

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

The writing of this book has been, like the Chinese Revolution, a long process climaxed by an act. The process has been the development of a manner of thinking about Communist China in particular, and about ideology and organization in general; the act has been writing it down in final form. Both process and act have taken place through human and intellectual experiences which have affected me as scholastic cogitation and library reading alone could never do. In this brief preface I can only mention a few friends and colleagues who have contributed to these experiences.

Much of my work was done at the Union Research Institute in Hong Kong, where knowledge and friendship have been generously offered to me. The many days of talking with Joseph Anderson Shih were for me not only a basic education on Communist China, but a path into the minds and feelings of Chinese individuals. Many other friends at U.R.I. were always ready to offer a helping hand: Maria Yen, Ho Chen-ya, Robert Hsi, Chao Yung-ch'ing, Jefferson Chen, Richard Diao, Chen Chien-jen, Chen I-lai, Wang Shu-chieh, and many others. I cannot begin to name the many other scholars, refugees, journalists, officials, whose thoughts contributed much to my own thinking during the time spent in Hong Kong.

In Berkeley, I wish to thank, in particular, Gregory Grossman who always was ready to help me regarding Soviet problems; our Comparative Communism group has been a major source of ideas for this book. At the Center for Chinese Studies, I wish to thank the late Tsi-an Hsia, whose kindness and brilliance are much missed. Gene Hsiao, Joyce Kall- gren, and John S. Service have been sources of steady intellectual, and Rose Fox of steady moral and technical, support. Without the work of my research assistant, Hung Chow, much of the material used would never have been gathered.

The act of writing could never have been completed without months of friendly struggle with Max Knight of the Editorial Department of the University of California Press. I wish to thank the Press for its patience with the many revisions made in the manuscript.

Outside of Berkeley, I wish to thank the members of our national seminar on Communist China: Doak Barnett, Alexander Eckstein, Richard Moorsteen, Jerome Cohen, Erza Vogel, and others. Many of their ideas and insights have found their way into this book.

Since research began in 1957,1 have enjoyed numerous sources of institutional support. At Berkeley, the Institute of International Studies, the Center for Chinese Studies, and the Institute of Social Sciences have been consistent in their support. The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies made the year’s stay in Hong Kong (1960-1961) possible. The Committee on the Economy of China of the Social Science Research Council gave me a year to work on industrial management in Communist China; for this, I wish to thank Walter Galenson.

Choh-ming Li was generously helpful during his tenure as Chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies; he made the Center into one of the leading research institutions on Communist China in the Western world.

Shih-hsiang Chen and Philip Selznick gave personal and intellectual support during the most difficult time of the writing of this book.

My two departments, Sociology and History (University of California, Berkeley), have always been willing to grant me leaves of absence to work on the book. Intellectual stimulation came, in particular, from my colleagues Joseph Levenson, Philip Selznick, S. M. Lipset, and Rein- hard Bendix.

In most cases, references are to the original sources; translations from the Chinese, Russian, and Japanese are my own. Where terminological renderings are not standard, I have supplied my own.

Romanization follows the Wade-Giles system, but hyphens in words have been omitted following current usage in Mainland China.

In Communist China, the Liberation was the end of one phase in China’s history and the beginning of another. I feel a sense of liberation now that the writing is over, but I also know that the future will lead to new roads of thought.

F. S.

Berkeley, California August, 1965

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

DEFINITIONS

PURE AND PRACTICAL IDEOLOGY Theory and Thought

Weltanschauung

Ideology and Behavior

The Theory of Contradictions

IDEOLOGY IN ACTION A System of Communications

The Mass Media

The Function of Ideology in.Organization

THE DIALECTICAL CONCEPTION OF CHINESE SOCIETY

The Dialectic of the Economy

The Dialectic of the State

The Dialectic of Society

The Resolution of Contradictions

CHAPTER II

SOVIET AND CHINESE CONCEPTIONS The Party as Organization

Party and State

State and Society

Nation

THE PARTY RULES

The General Outline of the Party Rules

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PARTY

THE STRUCTURE OF THE PARTY

The Central Organizations of the Party

The Organization of the Party in the Provinces

The Organization of the Party in the Hsien and Cities

Basic-Level Party Organization

Other Party Organizations

THE PARTY CADRE The Cadre Concept and its Development

Sources of Recruitment

GOVERNMENT GENERAL TRENDS IN ADMINISTRATION

CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

The State Council

The Military Branch

The Judicial Branch

VERTICAL RULE AND DUAL RULE

DECENTRALIZATION

REGIONAL GOVERNMENT

POWER AT THE PROVINCIAL LEVELS

CHAPTER IV

BUREAUCRACY AND MANAGEMENT Distinctions

Business and Industry,

The Dichotomy between Policy and Operations

Organizational Unity

Personal Relationships in Chinese Management

Technical and Human Organization

Leadership Alternatives for Management

Policy and Bureaucratism

THE SOVIET MODEL OF MANAGEMENT Rebuilding Management

The Responsibility System

One-man Management

THE ATTACK ON ONE-MAN MANAGEMENT Criticisms

One-Man Management and Kao Kang

The Intensifying Critique

A Chinese View of Soviet Methods

THE GROWTH OF PARTY AUTHORITY OVER MANAGEMENT The Abolition of One-man Management

Management Under Collective Leadership

The Great Leap Forward Conception of Management

TOWARD A MORE FLEXIBLE CONCEPTION OF MANAGEMENT

CONTROL CONCEPTS

Methods of Control in the Soviet Union and in Communist China

THE CREATION OF A CONTROL SYSTEM The Beginnings of Control Work

Control Correspondents and Denunciation

The Building Up of a Control Network

ECONOMIC CONTROL The Growing Concern with Economic Control

The Introduction of the Harbin System

Political and Economic Aspects of the Harbin System

The Harbin System as an Independent Control Structure

POLITICAL CONTROL The Shift Back to Political Controls

The Shift to Internal Controls

The Consummation of the Process

An Exception to the Trend

PURGES Rightism in the Ministry of State Control

The Second Stage of the Attack

The End of State Control Work

The Aftermath

CHAPTER VI

PRE-COMMUNIST URBAN ORGANIZATION Chinese Cities Before 1949

Paochia

URBAN ORGANIZATION DURING THE EARLY 1 9 5 0'S The Communist Takeover

The Residents Committees

URBAN ORGANIZATION DURING THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD Conditions Leading to the Urban Communes

Formation of the Urban Communes

The Chengchow Urban Commune

The Urban Commune as a Unit of Administration,

THE CONTEMPORARY URBAN SITUATION The Exodus from the Cities

The Dilemma of the Cities

CHAPTER VII

PEASANTRY AND VILLAGE IN TRADITIONAL CHINA State and Village

Lichia and Paochia

CHINESE COMMUNISM ANDTHE VILLAGES BEFORE 1949 Village Cooperative Movements

Cooperatives during the Yenan Period (1935-1946)

Village Organization and the Relationship

Conflict in the Village

Land Reform and the Revolutionary Terror

VILLAGE POLICY IN THE EARLY 1950’S A New Administrative System

VILLAGE POLICY IN THE MIDDLE 1 950'S The Creation of Agricultural Producers Cooperatives (APC's)

Problems of Cooperativization

APC's and Hsiang

The Pace of Cooperativization

Changes in the APC's

VILLAGE POLICY DURING THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD Policy Changes Late in 1957

The Campaign to Build Water Works

Changes in Work Organization

Amalgamating the APC's

The Emergence of the Communes

The Militarization of the Peasantry

The Nature of Commune Organization

Amalgamation of State and Society

The Retreat

The Commune in Historical Perspective

REFLECTIONS ON THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

ORGANIZATION

PARTY

ARMY

GOVERNMENT

SOCIETY

WORKERS AND PEASANTS

THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX FOR MAIN TEXT

INDEX FOR SUPPLEMENT

INTRODUCTION

Chinese communism came to power and created the present People’s Republic of China through revolutionary struggle. The last decade and a half in China have witnessed a human drama played out by great and small men who have used organized political power for many different ends. They have rebuilt a great country, disciplined its people, improved the conditions of life, and laid the foundations for growth. They have also fought each other, challenged other countries, oppressed their opponents, and imposed suffering on their people. We have not set ourselves the task of describing that human drama. We are concerned with the systematic structures created by these men. Communist China is like a vast building made of different kinds of brick and stone. However it was put together, it stands. What holds it together is ideology and organization.

The key thesis of the Prologue was that ideology and organization have arisen in China because a traditional social system no longer existed to give unity to the society. Sociological theorists have argued at great length about the nature of social systems. Here we can do no more than offer a simple working definition. Systems are complex unities, or, as sociologists put it, any patterned collection of elements. ¹ Ap-

* Marion J. Levy, Jr., The Structure of Society (Princeton, N. J., 1952), pp. 19-20.

plied to society, the concept system designates unified patterns of human interaction.1 What is important to our working definition is that any social system has core elements. If they are destroyed, then the system ceases to exist. The assumption implies that other elements can be destroyed without affecting the essential unity and existence of the system. Sociologists have also generally made this assumption, and put it in terms of the functional requisites of society. 2 Further we make the assumption that social systems are self-regulating and self-maintain- ing. This means that conscious individual effort is not needed to maintain the patterns. The argument on self-regulation is also made by classical economic theory about economic systems. Here self-regulation is assured by the laws of the market.3

At certain times in a country’s history things change so radically that the old patterns no longer reappear to reconstitute unity. One must therefore ask: what is so central in a social system that its destruction causes the disappearance of the whole system? Sociologists have indicated that the central element of a social system which assures its unity, existence, and self-regulation is culture. 4 For purposes of our working definition, the designation of culture as the central or core element is not a sufficient answer.

It has been suggested that the mark of a true revolution is the destruction of the elite of a social system.5 The history of the world’s great social revolutions bears this out. The climactic moments of social revolutions are the physical and psychological destruction of a ruling elite. What inevitably followed was a radically changed society. The concept elite implies the existence of a class of individuals from which flows authority, in its most legitimate sense. Authority is a reciprocal relationship between individuals in which one has the right to command with the assured expectation of compliance on the part of the other.6 When a ruling group in society loses authority, for whatever reason, it ceases to be an elite.

For our working definition, we shall regard social elements from which authority flows as the center or core of any social system. In some societies, it is a single recognizable ruling group from which ultimate authority flows. Such a group we will call a true elite.

A true elite may be defined as a social group which enjoys wealth, power, and prestige. It has the relatively largest share of the society’s scarce wealth. It exercises command in the various organizational structures that criss-cross society. It gains honor and esteem from the population as a whole.7 In the instances of revolution which are cited in the Prologue, economic reasons were not the immediate causes for the great acts of destruction practiced against social elites, though they played a crucial part in bringing about the process of revolution. The act of revolution deprives an elite of wealth, power, and prestige. However, examples from history, including that of China, show that when an act of revolution is not complete and only deprives an elite of its wealth, it can subsequently use its power and prestige to reacquire it. An act of revolution to be effective must also destroy the power and prestige of the elite. Since we here are mainly concerned with the act of revolution, we shall only look at power and prestige.8

Power can be exercised directly by one man over his subordinate. Some societies, notably feudal, are characterized by highly personalized webs of power relationships. However, in nonfeudal complex societies, power is normally exercised in organization. This brings us to one of the key concepts of this book. Organization has befen defined in sociological theory as structures of differentiated roles.9 In this sense, any group in which roles are differentiated can be described as organization. However, for our working definition, we shall use a narrower formulation: organizations are structures of differentiated roles which require the ordered exercise of power. In these structures, some men command and others obey. Since all societies need the ordered exercise of power, all societies have organization. Every civilized society has complex organizations, ranging from macrosocietal political networks down to the smallest human groupings. Our definition of organization suggests that all organization is ultimately political. Organization requires decisions—decisions require power. Through the structures of organization power is transformed into action.

Prestige is a somewhat invidious word, normally defined as blinding or dazzling influence. A more general sociological concept which includes prestige, is status, which Marion Levy defines as the sum total of ideal or institutionalized roles.10 Men clearly may have low status, from which flows no blinding or dazzling influence. High status gives rise to prestige, though it need not be as extreme as our definition. We are interested, however, in the relationship Levy asserts between status and role. Levy’s formulation states more where status comes from than what it is. We would suggest that status, regardless of where it comes from, is functionally independent of role. It derives directly from the quality of the person and does not relate to what he does, namely his roles. Prestige gives men influence in society, that is, a certain legitimate authority, which they have almost regardless of what they do. Roles are learned, often laboriously. Status is conferred from without. Society gives it and only society can take it away.

Sociological theory asserts the difference of status and role, even though some theorists claim that status arises developmentally from generalized roles. For our purposes, however, the differences are decisive. In effect, organization is a structure of essentially political roles, that is to say defined activities concerned with command and compliance. Organizations may use status, but status is not an inherent part of organization. To expand our working definition further, we assert that status, as a type of authority, is the core element of the social system. High status, in the form of prestige and influence, is generalized authority. It does not depend on specific roles. Organization, on the other hand, is a conscious contrivance with defined roles. Far from being self-regulating, it demands constant effort to maintain it. Routinization and institutionalization may mitigate the intensity of effort but never can do away with a need for it.

In stable societies, organizations are supported by social systems. In turn, social systems need organizations to realize the goals of their members. Nevertheless, no matter how interlocked, the two are different. In some societies, unity of social system and organization exists; in others it does not, or has been broken.11

Roles must be filled by individual men. Yet political roles demand special talents. If men cannot exercise leadership, then they are ill- equipped to assujne such roles. Leadership talents appear to be generally scarce in society, so that something must be done to make up this lack. This is accomplished essentially in two ways: On the one hand, the power of command is built into the role. Regardless of who exercises the role, some command will flow from it. But leadership requires more than the mechanical exercise of predetermined command—it demands ability to innovate and create. Thus, on the other hand, classes of men exist in society on whom authority in general has been conferred and who have been trained to wield such authority. It is normal for an organization to recruit such men to fill its political roles. Men who have status assume leadership roles in organization. The power they exercise thus rests on a foundation of authority. A reverse process undoubtedly also occurs, as implied in Levy’s statements, namely that men acquire status from the generalization of specific roles. These are matters of historical process.

If a recognizable class of men in society enjoy status and power, they have high position in a social system and exercise leadership in organization. If they also command wealth, that class constitutes a true elite. Whether it is command over wealth which gives rise to power and prestige, as Marx argues, or the reverse, as Weber argues, is a matter we cannot discuss here. Suffice it to say that, in traditional China, wealth, particularly in the form of land, was generally the first step on the ladder of social mobility.¹⁸

Since power is exercised as leadership in organization and status is imbedded in a social system, one can say that a true elite occupies a firm position both in organization and in system. It has roots in the system and acts in organization. It needs both to maintain itself. In turn, this dual position serves to reinforce both system and organization. An elite armed with status makes its role in organization more authoritative. An elite that has organizational power can use it to increase, solidify, and transmit to its progeny the status that it enjoys. We call this the unity of system and organization. As loftg as system and organization are functionally interlocked by a true elite, unity and stability prevail in society.

Traditional societies have been characterized by such a unity of system and organization. However, as traditional societies have gone into decline, system and organization have begun to recede from each other. The impact of the West on the non-European countries has resulted in the generation of complex, new structures of organization.

18 Ping-ti Ho, The Ladder of Social Success in Imperial China (New York, 1962)» pp. 41-52.

Indeed, one may even speak of an organizational revolution in the world. Under these conditions, many traditional elites have been unable to carry out the leadership roles demanded by modern organization. The result has been that they have gradually lost authority, even though they could still command the power that their formal organizational roles gave them. But the authority of traditional elites has often been attacked from another direction as well. As the social system begins to disintegrate, the influence, prestige, and status of the elites begin to disappear. Our discussion of the social revolution in China indicates that even before the coming of the West, an assault had been mounted against the traditional social system.

Having distinguished between social system and organization, let us look again at the problem of the core or central elements of a social system, which we have defined as those from which authority flows. First, as sociological theorists have generally recognized, social systems are held together by cultures. For purposes of our working definition, we shall state this more specifically by saying that social systems are held together by an ethos from which values and norms derive. Values and norms have a compelling effect on human behavior and thus constitute a form of authority. Therefore, in order to exercise authority, an individual must have fully internalized these values and norms. Anthropologists call this enculturation; sociologists call it socialization. In contrast, organizations are held together in some instances by laws and rules, and in others by ideology.

We have already identified a second core element, namely a true elite from which authority flows, in the form of high status or prestige. Prestige and influence are collectively imbedded in such an elite or status group. In turn, membership in such a group confers prestige and influence, hence authority. Depending on what kind of society it is, membership may be acquired by achievement or ascription. The counterpart of an elite in organization is its body of leaders. These may or may not coincide with an elite, depending on whether there is or is not a unity of system and organization.

Human relations require behavior, and only individuals can manifest behavior; therefore social systems require ideal individuals. We can now identify a third core element in a social system, namely individuals who, having been thoroughly enculturated and being members of the highest status group, are able to exercise authority. These are what sociologists call modal personalities. These are the men on whom a society governed by a social system confers status and power. Such ideal individuals are assured of the highest positions in society. However, this is possible only if the ethos, the status group, and the modal personality retain full legitimacy in society. Only under this condition can authority flow from them. But if they lose legitimacy, the ideal individuals—no matter how gifted and saintly—find that the social system no longer grants them authority. On the other hand, they may, by these same gifts and saintliness, find it possible to play a leadership role in organization and rise to the top. As we have pointed out, roles can be learned, but status is conferred only by society.

In traditional China, the trinity of ethos, status group, and modal personality was represented by Confucianism, the gentry, and the pater familias (12 The great land reform of the late 1940’s finished the destruction of the gentry. And as for the pater familias, China has undergone a family revolution, which began toward the turn of the century and was completed by the Communists. The new marriage law symbolized the liberation of women and the final destruction of the authority of the pater familias-15

After many years of Communist rule, there is no evidence that China will ever return to this ancient trinity. There are lingering vestiges of Confucian humanism, but Confucius* museumification by the Chinese Communists testifies to its present-day impotence as a living ethos.16 Despite the recurring attack on landlord elements, the real rural enemy of the regime is the newly emerging rich peasant, and not the landlord of a past day. The authority of the pater familias in the past depended on the suppression of women. If the Communists have succeeded in anything, it has been in bringing women fully into public life. With the traditional trinity of authority gone, the social system itself has disappeared.

The traditional elite of China was attacked from two directions. The coming of modern organization deprived it of its leadership role in society. The erosion of the social system deprived it of its status. All it had left was naked power and naked wealth. The act of class destruction directed against the traditional elite at the time of the land reform in the late 1940’s came when its position in a crumbling social system was already undermined.

Social systems take time to build up; once destroyed, long periods of time must elapse before one can say that a new social system has arisen. During the interval, organization pulls and holds society together. Organization must now do for society what earlier had been done by the social system. It must provide functional equivalents for the elements swept away by the revolution.

We have stated that ethos, status group, and modal personality are core elements of a social system. What are their equivalents in China today? For ethos, ideology has been substituted. A belief system that expressed basic social and human values has been replaced by an ideology that expresses values and goals of sociopolitical action and achievement.

As for status, its functional equivalent today is leadership, specifically in organization. Thus its corporate form is the body of organizational leaders, in particular the Party. However, since a social system may be gradually re-forming in China, leadership is taking on some qualities of status. As we shall point out (p. 51), the body of organizational leaders is turning into a new elite with political status deriving from ideology. However, China also has a second emerging elite with social status deriving from education. If the former are the red cadres, the latter are the professional intellectuals. There has so far been no meshing of the two to constitute a true single elite, functionally comparable to the old gentry. A new class, in the words of Milovan Djilas, may have arisen in the Soviet Union, but not yet in China.

Who in China today constitutes a functional equivalent to the pater familias? The modal personality in Communist China is the cadre, the revolutionary leader in organization. He is young, not old; he is a leader, not a conciliator; he operates in the public realm, not in the private. But, the ideal of the cadre is being challenged by another ideal, that of the educated professional. Thus, not only are two elites competing with each other, but two human ideals. The contradiction between these two ideals is, in fact, reflected in the cadre concept, as we shall point out in the Party chapter; the cadre is ideally expected to be both red and expert.

It is an immense task to study a structure of ideology and organization which is the functional equivalent of an entire social system. The only approach I could see was to identify certain central areas of concern, and begin the study. The chapters of this book are the central concerns I chose: Ideology, Party, Government, Management, Control, Cities, and Villages.

Ideology, as we have said, is the functional equivalent of the former ethos. Just as the ethos held the social system together, so does ideology hold organization together. When the decision was made to study the ideology, it was quite early apparent that little would be gained by exegesis of the voluminous ideological literature that has appeared in China. Given the Chinese Communist stress on the unity of thought and practice, the only meaningful way to study ideology seemed to be to see how it was used. In the early parts of the chapter on ideology, we introduce some theoretical distinctions useful for the analysis of the ideology as a whole. We have tried to single out the central ideas of the ideology. We end the chapter with a discussion of how ideology was used by the leaders of Communist China to analyze the basic elements (i.e., contradictions) of their society and to develop a program of action that led to the Great Leap Forward.

The Party can be regarded as the postrevolutionary successor to the gentry. Earlier the gentry with its status dominated the life of China; today it is the Party with its leadership. This remarkable organization is a phenomenon China has never known before. It stands as an alter ego alongside every unit of political, social, economic, and cultural organization in the country. In the Party chapter we begin with a discussion of the self-conception of the Party, which may be considered a link between our discussion of ideology in the first chapter and our discussions of organization in the later chapters. After describing the Party’s growth and development, we discuss it in structural terms, and end with a section on the Party cadre, the new leader in Communist China.

The government of Communist China is new in function as well as structure; it has replaced one that, more often than not, was new only in structure. The chapter on government is relatively short, because material for more detailed study was not available. In this chapter, we are mainly concerned with principles and methods of administration, and the general trends which have led to different concentrations and distributions of power.

The chapters on Party and government deal with structures of organization; the two that follow deal with functions of organization. Management and control have been selected as two important types of organizational function.

Management means leadership; leadership, as we have said, has replaced status as a source of command. Though there were many possible approaches to the study of leadership, we chose management because of its importance for economic development. In the chapter on management we begin again by introducing some theoretical and conceptual distinctions needed for later analysis, both in this and other chapters. We also briefly discuss pre-1949 Chinese business practices, since they have influenced management methods in Communist China. Beginning with this chapter, we treat the subject chronologically. As with the chapters on control, cities, and villages, we trace the development of different policies and methods of management from the Liberation through the end of the 1950’s. A periodization is apparent in the management chapter, with the two main time periods marked by the First Five-Year Plan and the Great Leap Forward. Our discussion on management deals largely with the command system and has relatively little to say about the economic aspects of management.

Control is an essential counterpart to leadership; we might say that, in Communist China, active organizational controls have supplanted the passive compliance deriving from the traditional authority of the social system. Although the police and legal systems may appear to be obvious organizations to study from the point of view of control, study of the interrelationships between political and economic controls over industrial enterprises promised to reveal more about the nature of control in Communist China than a study of the former. Our discussion in the chapter on control focuses on the changing fortunes of the Ministry of State Control, whose rise and fall shows how control functions in Communist China.

Whereas chapters two through five discuss organization alone, the last two chapters, cities and villages, deal with the imposition of organization on society. These two chapters discuss the reorganization of Chinese society attempted by the Communists.

Though the appearance of Chinese cities has changed greatly in the wake of the revolution, more important have been the changes in social organization. The many associations that once governed the life of city dwellers in China have disappeared; they have been replaced by new forms of social organization, two of which we discuss in the chapter on cities, namely the residents committees and the urban communes.

The last chapter deals with China’s most typical form of social organization: the village. The Chinese Revolution was fought and won in the villages, but the end of the revolution did not bring about a transformation of the nature of the village. Though the old gentry elite was destroyed and land was distributed through the land reform, the Chinese Communists only gradually introduced new forms of organization into the village. Since the problems of the village, more so than any others discussed in this book, are rooted in the past, we begin with a brief discussion of certain aspects of traditional village social organization, notably the relationship between state and village, and types of village civil and military organization. We continue, for the Communist period, with a discussion of the three stages of Chinese Communist village policy: land reform, cooperativization, and communization. A theme sounded in this chapter, as well as in others, is that the revolution has continued beyond the Liberation. We suggest in fact that the social revolution continued down to the time of communization, and that perhaps only now is it being succeeded by the economic revolution.

Forty years after the October Revolution, sociological study of the Soviet Union became possible, because in time new patterns of social organization and stratification had solidified and become visible.¹⁷ That time may now gradually be approaching in China. For example, lines of status differentiation are reappearing in various social and organizational contexts. As indicated, the intellectuals, the general term for those with higher education, constitute an emerging status group. The Party itself is now more than an organization; it has become an important vehicle for granting political status. Regional differences continue to remain important, indicating that the past has not been completely replaced by the present. There is evidence that new kinship ties are being formed, now that the impact of liberation (i.e., the freeing of men from the shackles of the past) has passed. All this would indicate that a social system is slowly beginning to reconstitute itself.

Though a social system may be re-forming, the story of Communist China to this day is still one of organization. Men spend most of their every-day life in organization. During the day, they work in factories, rural production teams, administrative offices, and schools. During the evening, they attend public meetings, rest in public parks, participate in public amusements. Private life takes place mostly within the confines of the small nuclear family; the old three-generational family is difficult to maintain, 16 a large extent because the smallness of living space does not allow for it. In Communist China, man lives, works, and rests in organization.

It is possible that the seeming reconstitution of the social system may simply be institutionalization; that is, organizational forms and individual behavior are becoming habitual. In traditional China, the social system was realized at the local level—for example, in a rural area cen tered on a town. The gentry, China’s traditional elite, lived in the town and exercised authority over the villagers. A common culture covering the entire society and a state which recruited from the gentry held these many systems together. Since China is today half-Western and half- Chinese, so to speak, there is as yet no single unifying culture. The state today covers all of society through organization, but there is no local community such as that of the traditional social system. As long as local life remains public, that is, a part of China as a whole, there is little likelihood of social systems comparable to the traditional ones emerging. The new social system, if it ever emerges, must be the equivalent of the whole society, or the nation. China, like most modern countries, appears to be far from a condition of such national integration that one can yet speak of the reappearance of a social system.

After 1 had completed this book, I realized that I had omitted an important area of organization: the army. By the mid-1960’s, it was becoming clear that the Chinese Communists were moving in the direction of creating a new organizational trinity of state, where party, government, and army each played a different, vital, and interrelated role.

The army today consists of two great parts, the regular army known as the People’s Liberation Army and the civil militia (minping). The latter forms a crucial part of the commune system. The former, although of course constituting China’s major defense force, has now entered civil society and plays a vital role in economic administration. During the last few years, so-called political departments, directly modeled on those in the army, have been established throughout the economic and industrial administration. Even more important, there is evidence that former army officers are assuming leadership positions within these new organizational units. It is not an uncommon phenomenon for armies in the newly emerging countries to play an important part in the life of civil society. However, in few countries has the army become an integral part of civil society. The military tradition in the Soviet Union has kept the armed forces largely segregated from civilian life. During the 1950’s, the Chinese Communists pursued a similar policy. However, ever since the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese Communists have been narrowing the gap between army and society, and moving gradually toward the institutionalization of this trinity of state.

One of the main problems with which this emerging trinity is designed to cope is the role of young cadres in the new society. Youth constitutes a major leadership element in any society, but its leadership functions are normally activated only in a military context. In civil society, they are forced to pursue long career lines until they can attain positions of authority and responsibility. Young red cadres led the Chinese Communists to victory, and Mao is clearly determined that they shall continue to play a major leadership role in Chinese society. Government, as almost everywhere, is staffed largely by older men. The Chinese Communist party is rapidly becoming middle-aged, largely due to a low attrition rate. The army, on the other hand, governed by a high turnover rate, remains young.

Having now listed the areas of concern discussed in this book, I would like to say a few words about the methodology of this study. It was not possible to start with an a priori framework of analysis. There was almost no secondary literature to be used as a guide, in the sense that such literature often points out major problems, introduces concepts, and does the spade work by organizing a confused mass of material. Knowledge of Soviet organization was necessary, in view of the heavy borrowings made by the Chinese Communists. But the Soviet model could not be mechanically tested on China. The only initial approach then, as it seemed to me, was to put one’s fingers on the major problem areas and immerse oneself in the documentary and human material.

Intuition is a major part of the rational process, for one has to sense the relevance of problems before one can use the ordering capacities of the mind to construct patterns. Yet much had to be done before confidence in intuition was strong enough. Hundreds of articles had to be read in the original Chinese, with precision and at the same time extensively. It was imperative to interview people who had significant organizational experiences, and this required a fluent knowledge of Chinese as it is spoken in China today. Translations and interpreters proved to be inadequate for the task. They can transmit information, but obstruct intuition. It was necessary to listen to radio broadcasts from the Mainland to sense the tone of agitation and propaganda. Intuition was necessary to gain a feeling of assurance that I was moving in the right direction.

On the other hand, intuition alone could lead to a dead end, where one sensed what was right but could not explain it. Recourse had constantly to be taken to the theoretical and comparative literature. How could such and such an organizational function be explained in general theoretical terms? How did such and such an approach to the Chinese Communists compare with the Soviet? If intuition gave a sense of assurance, readings in theoretical an

What made it difficult to separate one approach from the other in neat systematic fashion was the factor of change. Despite the fact that Communist China has been in existence only a few years, it already has passed through three major phases of development—phases in which profound changes took place in the structure and function of organization. The Chinese Communists entered the cities not knowing how they would govern, beyond the conviction that it had to be through total organization. Their initial effort was to introduce the apparatus of Soviet-type organization into China. But while doing so, they faced immense difficulties. In the mid-1950’s, they veered from the Soviet model, and began to develop their own approaches. The Great Leap Forward constitutes an alternative to the Soviet approach. Since the early 1960’s, they have entered a new phase, for which no official designation exists. Ideology and organization, politics and economics are not as closely linked as they were in the earlier phases. It is under conditions of change that one gets an idea of what the real problems are.

Organizations arise as mechanisms to attain goals and cope with change. A study of organization must trace it through the battles it has waged under fluctuating conditions, much as the history of an army would have to be traced through a war. Sociological writing on traditional China has treated Chinese society as system, more or less abstracted from time. Social systems, in fact, can be formulated in no other way. But it would have served no useful purpose to do an abstract structural or functional analysis of organization in Communist China. Structurally, all that would have emerged would have been arid organization charts, which, in any case, would have had relevance for only one short period of time. Functionally, the same would apply, because the roles and relationships of the actors have changed constantly. The functional situation that prevailed under one-man management was far different from what prevailed under Party leadership later. It is for this reason that I have chosen to follow most of the problem areas in their changing and developing contexts. As a whole, the narrative does not go beyond the 1950’s, and tends to concentrate on the first half of the 1950's. The trends and problems that characterize the later periods were already visible at that time.

Sociologists, it is said, are concerned with patterns, whereas historians are concerned with continuity and change. In this sense, I have written this book both as sociologist and historian. While organization and action seem constantly to be changing in Communist China, they are also governed by basic patterns that do not change or do so slowly. The Chinese Communists speak of the law of the unity of opposites. They mean by this, in effect, that opposites change and new opposites arise, but the laws that govern their interrelationships remain constant.13 As a sociologist, I have tried to sketch out these laws; as a historian, I have tried to record the opposites.

The alternating use of the empirical and intuitional approach on the one hand, and of the theoretical and comparative approach on the other, has given this book a dual appearance. Using the first approach, I have tried to sketch out the patterns inherent in the material itself. Since the Chinese Communists are systematic in their thinking and writing, one can find patterns in the way they discuss problems, particularly if they introduce their discussions, as they often do, with a general review of what came before. Thus, for example, in our discussion of industrial management, we sketch out empirical patterns which the Chinese Communist documents themselves reveal. However, since the categories and language of the ideology take time to learn, one has to read the documents carefully until intuition indicates that the major patterns have been correctly perceived.

The sketching out of other patterns, however, required the use of the second approach. Sometimes, organizational theory pointed to patterns which were not immediately apparent in the literature. At other times, comparison with the Soviet Union suggested patterns. At yet other times, it was clear that some problems, seemingly peculiar to the Chinese Communists, were but variants of general organizational problems, for which general theory suggested patterns. Thus, for example, our three-tiered conception of organization and our discussion in terms of the staff-line concept (see pp. 68-73) were suggested by general theory, but made sense when the relevant material was studied.

At the end of our Prologue, we asked the question: Where is China in all these processes? Since much of what we understand by China was bound up with the traditional social system, that question has been partly answered by our discussion of the Chinese Revolution in the Prologue and by our discussion of social system and organization in this Introduction. However, the full answer has not been given. We begin the body of this book with a discussion of ideology, a new phenomenon in China; we continue with organizations that are also new to China. But we end with cities and, in particular, villages, where it becomes clear that the links with the past were not entirely broken in 1949.

What broke off sharply in 1949 was the link to the past through the gentry. But the bulk of the people (workers, peasants, intellectuals, and even the remnant bourgeoisie) retain links with the past. Through them some gentry values continue to infuse Chinese life; also through them, particularly through the dty population, are transmitted modern Western values learned before 1949.

Some day historians undoubtedly will write a history of Communist China that spans the periods before and after 1949. But that can only be done when the basic patterns of ideology and organization have been formulated, as we shall attempt to do in this book.

1 2Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, 111., 1951), p. 5.

2 Levy, op. cit„ pp. 149 ff.; Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, 111., 1957), pp. 25-37.

3 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, Mass., 1957), pp. 40, 68 ff.

4 Parsons, op. cit.t p. 5.

5 Chalmers Johnson, Revolution and the Social System (Stanford, Calif., 1964), p. 8.

6 «Ibid., pp. 259-260.

7 Some writers assert that the economy in premodern societies is a subsystem of a larger social system. Thus Polanyi, for example: "The outstanding discovery of re

8 cent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships" (op. cit. p. 46). Talcott Parsons and Neil Smelser, in effect, take a similar position even for contemporary society (Economy and Society [Glencoe, 111., 1956]).

9 Levy, op. cit.t p. 165.

10 nibid., pp. 157-160.

11 Our distinction between social system and organization is analogous to the well- known distinction of state and society (see Bendix, op. cit., pp. 473 ff.). For our pur

poses, we use the term society in the most comprehensive sense to designate all that

is social among a culturally and historically defined body of human beings.

12 Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1958 and 1964), I and II.

12 Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer, The Soviet Citizen (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).

13 IB As a Czech joke puts itf socialism has two stages: first, the difficulties of development, and second, the development of difficulties.

CHAPTER I

IDEOLOGY

IN 1949 the victorious Chinese Communists began the tough struggle of pulling the broken parts of China into unity and transforming a backward society into a modern nation. To achieve that unity and to bring about that transformation, the Chinese Communist party, a political body of a type never before known in Chinese history, made use of the same tools with which it won the Chinese Revolution— ideology and organization. This book describes the methods and processes whereby the Chinese Communist party, through a consistent yet changing ideology, created a web of organization which covers all Chinese society and penetrates deep into its fabric.

But while ideology and organization have brought about unity and transformation, they have also created contradictions which have made that web of organization into a polylithic structure where power, once concentrated at the apex, has begun to spread to other parts. Through this book goes the thread that contradictions have been essential to the methods and inherent in the processes of the struggle for unity and transformation.

DEFINITIONS

Ideology is generally defined as the manner of thinking characteristic of a class or an individual1 In this book, we regard ideology as a manner of thinking characteristic of an organization. If organization is a rational instrument engineered to do a job, 2 then the human beings who create and use it must do so on the basis of a set of ideas. However abstract these may be, they must have action consequences, for the purpose of organization is action. The more systematic organization becomes, the greater is the need for a systematic set of ideas to govern it.

Discussions of class or individual ideologies, such as those of Karl Mannheim, assume that ideologies are sets of ideas which have their unity not in the ideas themselves, but in the collective or individual unconscious.³ Thus, a class or an individual may express a range of ideas which phenomenally appear to be diverse, yet noumenally have a unity in an underlying spiritual matrix. To say that ideas are systematic means consciously to make them into a coherent, integrated whole. The mentioned conception of class and individual ideologies implies that their sets of ideas need not be consciously systematic.

Organizations are different from classes and individuals in that they are the products of conscious creation. Thus, ideologies which serve to create organization require a conscious conception of unity; they cannot rely on an underlying spiritual matrix to give unity to their ideas. Such ideologies achieve unity through systematization of their ideas. In fact, since real organization can rarely be fully systematized, it is often only in the realm of ideology that systematization is achieved.

We therefore suggest that there are ideologies of organization in addition to those of classes and individuals, and define an organizational ideology as a systematic set of ideas with action consequences serving the purpose of creating and using organization.3

The ideology of the Chinese Communist party is one of the great organizational ideologies of the modern world. Having taken its basic elements from Marxism, Leninism, and ideas developed in the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist party, over the four decades of its history, has made its ideology into a systematic set of ideas which it used to create its own organization and to achieve its goals.

If Chinese Communist ideology is a systematic set of ideas, one would expect to find a systematic presentation of those ideas in some major document, somewhat in the manner of a constitution. Such a major document exists in the form of the Party Rules. Each Party congress ends with the formal adoption of a new set of rules which state the major ideas that govern Party policy, organization, and action. The Party Rules can be said to contain the formal ideas basic to the ideology. In the chapter on the Party, we shall analyze those rules to indicate the self-conception of the Chinese Communist party.

However, analysis of these formal ideas does not in itself reveal the manner of thinking characteristic of the Chinese Communist party. Ideas are formulated thoughts expressed in a particular language. The ideas set forth in the Party rules are formulated in the language of Marxism-Leninism. They are like the differently shaped parts of a machine. Each idea is different, but is shaped by a uniform language. Together, these ideas constitute the structure of the ideology. Some students of the Chinese Communists often speak of their ideology as being the cause of a particular policy. In such a case, they implicitly regard ideology as a whole machine, seen only from the outside, and performing some task. How the machine works in the inside is not taken into consideration. Other students of the Chinese Communists go deeper, focus on the formal ideas, and describe their shapes; they look at the parts of the machine. Such an approach may be described as exegesis, and, indeed, is the approach we have followed in our discussion of the Party’s self-conception. Yet, neither of these approaches tells us how the different parts function with each other, how they move within the ideology to produce a particular effect. In short, these approaches do not reveal the manner of thinking to which the ideology gives rise.

It is this manner of thinking which we shall attempt to describe in the present chapter. Only men, not classes or organizations, think. Therefore, we want to describe the way a Chinese Communist individual, thoroughly imbued with the ideology, uses its ideas. The Party rules, and other ideological documents, present abstract formal ideas; as such, these ideas have no immediate relevance for action. A man can recite them by rote, but one will not know whether he really thinks with them. Only by seeing how these abstract ideas are transformed into concrete action can one begin to perceive the manner of thinking. In a machine, a few parts have central significance. So in ideology: there are ideas which give a certain energy to all the other ideas with which they come in contact. In this chapter, we shall try to single out the central ideas of Chinese Communist ideology by determining which have the greatest importance for organization.

To find out these central ideas, we have drawn from a broad range of published material. Since the Chinese Communist party, as a modern rational organization, requires conscious efforts to maintain itself and achieve its goals, it demands a high level of consciousness from its members. Consciousness is achieved by making its members speak, write, and publish. Meetings are marked by intensive discussion; members must continuously write reports; Party material is published all the time, particularly in the form of ephemera, such as newspaper articles and pamphlets. Since publication is carefully controlled, only such material which accords with the central ideas of the ideology is made public. The massive outpouring of written material that has emerged from Communist China thus may be said to constitute concrete expression of the ideology. In this chapter, we have drawn broadly from this material, on the assumption that it expresses the central ideas, even if these change from time to time.

The material we have used consists of writings by men who play a crucial role in organization, either at the top or at some lower levels. In these writings, they use ideas to analyze concrete problems and recommend action. The moving threads that go through all these writings can be said to constitute the central ideas of the ideology.

This chapter ends with a section called The Dialectical Conception of Chinese Society. In this section, we explicitly attempt to describe the manner of ideological thinking most characteristic of the Chinese Communists, that is to say how formal ideas are combined with central ideas to produce an analysis of concrete reality with action consequences. This section must be last, because we cannot formulate the manner of thinking until we have dismantled the structure of the ideology and located its central parts.

The structure of the ideology consists of its sets of ideas. Although every published document can be regarded as a reflection of the ideology, some documents are regarded as doctrinal; these contain the conscious systematization to which the ideology aspires. The Party rules, of course, are such a document. More important are the four volumes of The Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. In addition, there are doctrinal articles written by Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-ch’i, and other major leaders. Though their systematic character is apparent, it is not easy to dismantle the sets of ideas presented into a few major component parts. Therefore, we shall suggest a different approach whereby the total structure of the ideology can be broken apart into two major components.

Let us recall one phrase in our initial definition of ideologies of organization, that is a systematic set of ideas with action consequences. Though such ideas ultimately give rise to action, the link between idea and action may be direct or indirect. Thus, the leaders of organization may propound an idea, for example a policy, which they expect their followers to implement. Such an idea may be said to have one-to-one action consequences. However, these same